Beyond Documentary Realism

Aesthetic Transgressions in British Verbatim Theatre

Cyrielle Garson

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110715866
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

Verbatim theatre, a type of performance based on actual words spoken by ''real people'', has been at the heart of a remarkable and unexpected renaissance of the genre in Great Britain since the mid-nineties. The central aim of the book is to critically explore and account for the relationship between contemporary British verbatim theatre and realism whilst questioning the much-debated mediation of the real in theses theatre practices.

1 Introduction

But beware. Verbatim theatre may not be for you. There is no real dialogue, no narrative structure and no conventional dramatic climax. Instead, you get a cast of characters talking directly to the audience instead of to each other. (King 2)

At a theatre in Britain over the past two decades the spectator might have happened on one of the following:

1. A theatre space that painstakingly resembles a tribunal exposing the constellation of past secrets, lies and the poor workings of British public institutions as it scrupulously recreates a past public inquiry that he or she may have witnessed first-hand in its natural habitat.
2. Or, a theatre space committed to a different and more extensive idea of theatre, deceptively dry, simple and empty except for stools or chairs with actors delivering defiant and unalloyed raw perspectives, discontinuous interstitial glitches apparently caught on the move, glimpses of individuals normally sidelined by mainstream society and official culture within the contemporary moment. In this space, these simplicities and tones of verbatim language interact with each other in a constant push and pull, and they multiply, proliferate ceaselessly and are always pointing towards a plausible “us” that speaks directly to the society and the times in which we are living.
3. Or perhaps a variant of number two that mixes these with more familiar conventions of the stage and playwriting so that Janet King’s words of warning – quoted in the epigraph – can almost be safely ignored.
4. Or, the spectator might have ecountered a theatre space occupied by a different kind of actor, performers wearing headphones, or earphones, or even in-ear monitors, where the figure of the actor is at once marginal and central and where meaning is assigned to his or her voice’s texture and tone, the tiniest haphazard details of speech, emphasing the disjunction between speaker and speech.¹
5. Or a more sophisticated and impeccably crafted multimedia theatre space announcing that “every word spoken on stage comes directly from interviews” – a stock feature of verbatim theatre, of which more a little later – and challenging or perhaps recalibrating some of the settled beliefs that so pervasively govern the spectator’s thinking as it combats the more familiar narratives of the mass media’s representations of the real. This performance may even be showcasing a physicality that moves the spectator and/or further complicates these matters.²
6. Or a piece that is so new that it does not sound or look like anything the spectator has ever seen before. It could well be a completely new genre that experiments with what he or she thought a musical ought to be.
7. Or, finally, a theatre space that is about the quality of engagement, that is used in a completely different way, always in the process of becoming something else, making the spectator experience – in the middle of the action taking place – some profoundly memorable and multifaceted painful emotions, small shifts of perception and perhaps even self-perception. In other words, a practice of holding up a space for something else to happen, imprinting itself on the mind of the spectactor.

I begin with these examples not because they are representative of all contemporary verbatim theatre in Britain, but because their particular concerns resonate with many of the key ideas explored in this study. In fact, each example directly relates to one of the case studies and, in a chronological order, so that (1) corresponds to Chapter 2.2. However, as Chapters 2.4 and 3.3 are not related to the main case studies, this means that (3) corresponds to Chapter 3.1, (6) to Chapter 4.2 and (7) to Chapter 4.3. Chapters 2.4 and 3.3 are transition chapters that encapsulate an urgent re-examination of the premises of the two chapters that have preceded them.

To come back to the examples, such performance works, which oscillate from a kind of rigidity to a dynamic flexibility, indicate a distinctive turn in British theatre history that is somewhat difficult to descipher in terms of aesthetics. In the first two instances (1) and (2), what is involved is a complex pact of performance that insists on its special relationship with “the real world” whilst attempting to erase or minimise the usual markers of theatricality.³ In the next two instances (3) and (4), this time, the spectator seems to be caught between two incompatible positions as if the performance were itself indecisive and admitting its own vulnerability. Unpacking briefly just these few examples uncovers thorny problems in the contemporary theoretical landscape. But before diving into these messy issues, let us first establish what I exactly mean by “verbatim theatre” so that what is at stake here becomes clearer and more concrete.

1.1 Definition and Context

What is contemporary British verbatim theatre? It is so many things that this entire volume can only give a partial answer. In fact, researcher Emma Cox prefers to use the plural, “verbatim theatres” (Noncitizenship 31), in recognition of the reputed unruliness of the field, the richly pluralistic and variegated nature of verbatim theatre, “the divergent ways in which such theatre can manifest” (Noncitizenship 31) and the valences the term can encompass in a contemporary British context. In other words, “verbatim theatre” is typical of a simple-sounding concept that turns out to be outrageously complicated.

Roughly speaking, verbatim theatre does not describe what the play or performance is about but how it is made, that is to say, the way in which the words have been selected. In this book, the kind of verbatim works to be encountered tends to primarily base its performance text on interviews, transcripts of public inquiries, as well as various documents in the public domain. The temptation may indeed be to expect that such performances are more straightforward and demand less work of their spectators. As British critic Aleks Sierz said in the context of a 2010 lecture entitled “Blasted and after: New Writing in British Theatre Today,” on the occasion of a meeting of the Society for Theatre Research at the Art Workers Guild in London, “what you see is what you get – and often what you see is all there is.”⁴ However, as this study will demonstrate, this narrow reading of verbatim theatre deserves to be challenged and a more critical reading of the contemporary verbatim output may shed light on some fascinating aspects that are entirely new to the critical arena of British theatre. With this end in mind, here, verbatim theatre is therefore considered as an inherently fluid and unstable discursive category rather than a definite dramatic genre with a shared documentary project. This is especially the case in the period under scrutiny that saw verbatim theatre seamlessly move away from and come back to its historical foundations.⁵ It is indeed my contention that what also matters – as in all works of art – is what the creative team does with these words.

Verbatim theatre – as both artistic method and output – has expanded exponentially since the mid-1990s and seems to coincide with the homogenising umbrella of a “renewed interest on the part of contemporary theatre practitioners in addressing political and social issues directly” (Goss, “Postdramatic” 160) in a post-political era, which has arguably come to dominate the British theatrical imaginary by stealth, its vibrant and momentous impact still resounding as these lines are being written.⁶ More significantly, since the early years of the 2000s, “verbatim theatre has become the new black” (Edwardes). Acres of print have been expended on verbatim theatre which may appear startling when, in fact, quantatively, it amounts to a lot less than more conventional types of theatre, but this (distorted) perception phenomenon has arguably happened before in British theatre history.⁷ As verbatim theatre has surged in power, so its detractors have grown in number and strength over the past two decades, as will be explored in Chapter 2 of this volume. Regardless of this situation, however, verbatim theatre has relentlessly continued to grow and to inspire contemporary artists. It should be stressed, moreover, that verbatim theatre may just be one of the fastest growing types of British theatre since it has, as Andrew Haydon suggested in a recent publication, “touched on almost every possible way of working in modern British theatre” (“2000s” 48). Clearly, we live in an age in which performances designated as “verbatim theatre”, either by artists themselves or by the press, are increasingly diverse. They have included monologues as exemplified by Sonja Linden and Christine Bacon’s Asylum Monologues (2006), audio-verbatim plays such as Going for a Walk, musicals (see Chapter 4.2), comedies such as Tamasha Theatre’s The Trouble with Asian Men (2005), very short plays such as Alecky Blythe’s Voices from the Mosque (2011) that was part of Headlong’s Decade on the responses to 9/11 on its tenth anniversary, collages of recreated interviews massaged with physical theatre (see Chapter 4.1), more abstract works such as Dan Rebellato’s Outright Terror Bold and Brilliant (2005), or even poetry as in Simon Armitage’s Black Roses: The Killing of Sophie Lancaster (2012) and, finally, verbatim sequels such as Cressida Brown’s Re-Home (2016) which revisited her Home (2006).⁸ Before going any further, however, it may be necessary to unpack some of the terminology used in the title of this book so as to expose the network of theoretical presuppositions it sets forth as well as its broader pattern of thinking.

To begin with a brief definition, by verbatim theatre, this book encompasses those performances characterised in their making by a central, or exclusive, reliance on the exact words of real people that have been gathered during a prolonged research phase and then creatively edited. The outcome of that work generally meets an audience and is performed by professional actors in a theatre setting.⁹ Typically, verbatim theatre-makers have very little knowledge (or no knowledge at all) as far as a specific issue is concerned and, as a result, they interview people in the hope of finding something that may contradict their own bias or some master narratives currently operating.¹⁰ It is not surprising, then, for these performances to hold “some degree of after-effect” (Goode, Forest 250), as the audience may become “newly informed by some verbatim piece” (Goode, Forest 250). Most of the time, it is necessary to have a written agreement (typically called a release, permission or consent form) between the people involved, that is to say, between the creative team and the interviewees, similar to what an ethnographer or oral historian would use. If one addresses the notion of a pact of performance in the context of these works, it is usually tied to a pact of authenticity, and more precisely to what this book calls “documentary realism.” The subject matter of verbatim pieces is extremely variable, but critics tend to focus solely on the technique itself rather than other aspects of the production, even though it is far from being a new form. Having said that, it is my contention that most verbatim works are about something that is already there whilst nobody is paying attention and wanting it to be more significant. For example, a verbatim piece such as Victoria Brittain’s The Meaning of Waiting (2010) wants the audience to engage with the often-unseen fallout of the war on terror in Britain through the words of eight prisoners’ wives. Furthermore, even though it is exclusively based on the words of real people, verbatim theatre can also convey a desire for something to be in the world that is not already there. One of Clare Summerskill’s latest verbatim plays, Rights of Passage (2016), on the plight of gay asylum seekers coming to the UK, does this rather successfully.

It is called verbatim theatre, but it is made up of many other things. People call it verbatim theatre because its verbatim components are more important than in other performances. The task of establishing and clarifying its aesthetics is complicated by the fact that no agreed principle really unites such performances beyond their use of verbatim materials/oral testimonies, whose degree is open to dispute. For example, as Elisabeth Angel-Perez explains, British playwright David Hare – whose play Stuff Happens (2004) is the case study in Chapter 3.1 – considers that verbatim theatre “is a form of drama made, for more than 60 % of the play, of the words of real people” (“Nation” 65), whereas for Dan Rebellato – in a more strict sense – it “involves plays in which all of the words are taken “verbatim” from existing sources” (“Writing” 156). Additionally, as conversations about verbatim theatre have proliferated since the 2000s (due to its resurgence and popularity), inevitably, so too has the meaning of the term as well as the practices it is understood to describe. In this new context, whereby diverse structures of performance increasingly incorporate verbatim material, one must be particularly weary of not mistaking its functional markers for the verbatim model itself. For this reason, it is necessary to go over some definitions that have had currency at this cultural moment.

First of all, by far the most important definition in the field is the one that Derek Paget provided in 1987, which coincided with the first appearance in print of the term “verbatim theatre”. In effect, this was the way playwright Rony Robinson, “a pioneer of the method” (Paget, “Oral History” 317), used the term in his own practice:

[i]t is a form firmly predicated upon the taping and subsequent transcription of interviews with ‘ordinary’ people, done in the context of research into a particular region, subject area, issue or event, or combination of these things. This primary source is then transformed into a text which is acted, usually by the performers who collected the material in the first place. (Paget, “Oral...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Documentary Realism
• 3 New Realism(s)
• 4 Post-Realism
• 5 Conclusion
• Index